Correction: A scholarly reader wrote in about the line, “They made a desolation and called it Peace,” in an LA Times piece about depleted uranium and used as the title of a recent dispatch: “Just for the record, the desolation/peace tag has nothing to do with the Punic Wars–I’m not sure how the LA Times columnist got that idea. Instead, it is the remark of the Roman historian Tacitus, put in the mouth of a native Briton, in reference to what the Romans did in their military conquest and cultural hegemony over England in the first century CE. The exact locus is Agricola 30.”
That line from Tacitus seems to fit no less well with the following piece from columnist Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times. His angry account gives a sense of the war we, here in the United States, never saw and know nothing about. It is Iraq not as a processional of problems and then triumph, but of killing fields and carnage, of scared, trigger-happy kids with the kind of firepower at their command that should never be loosed on another society. Tom
The Iraqi killing fields
By Pepe Escobar
The Asia Times
April 9, 2003AMMAN – “We know we don’t target journalists,” said the US Central Command (CentCom) in Qatar. Contrary to CentCom’s assertions, non-embedded journalists know that they have been targeted.
It was inevitable. When it finally happened, it was like clockwork. Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul was incinerated by four missiles in the 2001 ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan. True to CentCom form, al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad was hit by a Tomahawk this week in the invasion of Iraq – even though the Qatari network had offered its global positioning system (GPS) position to the Pentagon in late February.
Correspondent-producer Tariq Ayyoub, 35, Jordanian, father of an infant girl, was killed and a photographer was wounded. The Abu Dhabi TV office in Baghdad was hit by an Abrams tank – although they have been broadcasting from the same building for three years now.
To read more Escobar click here
AMMAN – “We know we don’t target journalists,” said the US Central Command (CentCom) in Qatar. Contrary to CentCom’s assertions, non-embedded journalists know that they have been targeted.
It was inevitable. When it finally happened, it was like clockwork. Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul was incinerated by four missiles in the 2001 ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan. True to CentCom form, al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad was hit by a Tomahawk this week in the invasion of Iraq – even though the Qatari network had offered its global positioning system (GPS) position to the Pentagon in late February.
Correspondent-producer Tariq Ayyoub, 35, Jordanian, father of an infant girl, was killed and a photographer was wounded. The Abu Dhabi TV office in Baghdad was hit by an Abrams tank – although they have been broadcasting from the same building for three years now.